Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer examines the supposed pagan origins of Halloween or “All Hallows Eve” and answers the question: Should Christians boycott Halloween?
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. This time of year people often ask if we should really be celebrating Halloween. After all, isn’t Halloween just a Christianized version of an ancient pagan holiday called Samhain? Wasn’t that some ancient Celtic pagan ritual day, which they contacted the dead and had bonfires to ward off evil spirits and the dead walked among the living. If you’ve heard any of that, I’m excited to tell you that’s all mythological. That’s not true. That’s not true history. That’s based on bad, outdated scholarship that had very little evidentiary value in the first place, which we now have strong reasons to believe is flatly untrue. So to get there, I want to look at several different sources, and I want to start with Robert Davis from the University of Glasgow up in Scotland, in his escaping through flames. Halloween is a Christian festival because in there he points out that it’s actually kind of controversial to say what should be really straightforward, namely that Halloween is a Christian feast.
It is the eve of all holies or all hallowed. So all saints, the word for saint is the word for holy is hallowed. So if you remember in the our Father, hallowed Be Thy name. So the evening before that, like Christmas Eve, all Hallows Eve becomes Halloween. That’s it. It’s not a pagan day. Nevertheless, to say that these days is to court hostility from two rival factions. On the one hand neo Pagans, people who imagine themselves as the heirs to the ancient Druids and this Celtic religion that they think existed before Christianity and they’re trying to restore it and they’ve tried to take Halloween as their rightful kind of lineage. So for instance, here’s a video from a Pagan on YouTube just from two days ago making this argument.
CLIP:
Hello, my name is Jacob Tots, and welcome back to the Wisdom of Odin. It’s finally autumn. I finally get to wear my scarf again, and this also means we’re closer to one of the best holidays and pagan celebrations that still exist today. Now, most people might know this holiday as Halloween. However, the origins of Halloween are within Samhain, which is spelled Sam Hain.
Joe:
So that’s the first group, and you kind get it if they want to claim the holiday, they don’t want to find out that they really didn’t. There is no such thing as old Celtic paganism and they didn’t have a big religious holiday on Samhain. That’s probably not going to be good news to the Pagans, but weirder are that there’s a bunch of evangelical Christians, mostly in the US who are convinced that it’s sinful to celebrate Halloween because they also think Halloween is of Pagan, not Christian origin. They also buy into this story about so and so. They think it’s satanic and idolatrous and dishonoring to God. So here’s a kind of classic example from the Christian perspective.
CLIP:
So Halloween was a celebration to honor or remember the dead. It was called All Hallows Eve, but many people can trace it back all the way to the Pagans, specifically a Celtic pagan celebration called Samhain. Now, this was basically a magical harvest festival that prepared people for the winter that was to come. It was not Christian at all. It was used to worship specifically other gods.
Joe:
But as Davis points out this idea that Halloween is just a thinly papered over Christian version of a Pagan holiday, it’s firmly ingrained in the popular imagination, partly because of older ethnographic scholarship. So 19th century to mid 20th century, you had scholars who would seriously make the claims you’re still hearing people make today, and as a result it’s become very difficult to question those assumptions. After all, as he points out, they’re repeated annually in serious journalism, the broadcast media, their pervasively on the internet, and even in well-intended educational literature. Rarely do people actually stop and say, well, how do we know that to be true? What’s the actual proof of this connection between so and Halloween? That’s what I want to do today because it turns out that evidence is not there at all.
In Davis’ words, he says, deeper scrutiny of the tissue of conjecture, supposition, and survivalism on which the account of the pagan Halloween rests raises the most serious doubts about the accustomed identification of Halloween with pre-Christian Celtic religious practice. And he knows that even imagining there is such a thing as Celtic Paganism is probably not an intelligible idea, but this whole popular story, the one that if you think you know better than your neighbor about Halloween, you’ve probably bought into is itself a myth. It is false. And to show that I want to take one of the popular presentations from National Geographic and just show how in a very short span of time it advances five feces that we can say pretty definitively are not true. So here’s a video and then we’ll unpack it one by one.
CLIP:
It all began with the Celts a people whose culture had spread across Europe more than 2000 years ago. October 31st was the day they celebrated the end of the harvest season in a festival called sowing. That night also marked the Celtic New Year and was considered a time between years a magical time when the ghost of the dead walked the earth.
It was the time when the veil between death and life was supposed to be at its thinnest
On Samhain. The villagers gathered and lit huge bonfires to drive the dead back to the spirit world and keep them away from the living. But as the Catholic church’s influence grew in Europe, it frowned on the pagan rituals like Samhain. In the seventh century, the Vatican began to merge it with a church sanctioned holiday. So November 1st was designated All Saints Day to honor martyrs and the deceased faithful.
Both of these holidays had to do with the afterlife and about survival after death. It was a calculated move on the part of the church to bring more people into the fold.
All Saints Day was known then as Hallus Hallow means holy or saintly. So the translation is roughly mass of the saints. The night before October 31st was all Hallow Eve, which gradually morphed into Halloween.
Joe:
Alright, so the Halloween is Pagan idea rests on really five claims or five assumptions. Number one, there’s a people called the Kelps and they have a common culture and common religion and common liturgical calendar where they’re all celebrating this feast day on the same day. Number two sa, their feast Day is also the Celtic New Year. That’s going to be important because as a result of that, we get to number three. It’s this magical time between the years in which the ghost of the dead can walk among the living on earth. Number four, this is why bonfires are created to ward off the dead and drive them back. And number five, when Christianity comes along, the Catholic church invents all day depending on the version of the story, either as a Christian alternative to Samhain, a response to Samhain or just a Christian version of Samhain.
We wanted to keep this pagan feast day, but we just change the name. It’s like doing somebody else’s homework and you just scratch out their name and put your name on it. Well, here’s the thing, all five of those claims are false. Number one, there is no one group called the Celts. The Celtic is this broad linguistic category that is sometimes used to describe a bunch of different tribes and cultures and peoples and languages that did not have the same religion. Number two, Samhain is not a Celtic anything. It’s an Irish day and it’s not as far as we can tell. New Year’s, we know when the Celts celebrated New Year’s, and it wasn’t on November 1st, number three, Samhain was not viewed as far as we can tell as a magical time of year or between the years in which the dead are walking among the living.
We don’t have any of that in the historical evidence. This is just modern fantasies about the past. Number four, while there are bonfires that are sometimes used on all Hall Eve, it turns out these are of Christian and not Pagan origin. And number five, all Saints Day being on November 1st has literally nothing to do with sa, and we can see that from the evidence. So let’s look at each of those in turn. Number one was there one big Celtic pagan religion. So I dunno if you caught this. I’m going to play you just a couple clips, a couple seconds in the clip we just heard and just listen to the way they speak about the CELs as if they’re a real group. That’s a monolithic kind of hole.
CLIP:
It all began with the Celts a people whose culture had spread across Europe more than 2000 years ago. October 31st was the day they celebrated the end of the harvest season in a festival called sowing.
Joe:
So the reason people like Robert Davis say it’s not even clear, it’s intelligible to speak of pre-Christian Celtic religious practice is because the Celts are people originally from central Europe and then they spread out in all directions. So they go as far east as was now Turkey. So when St. Paul writes to the Galatians, those are Celtic people, they have started speaking and writing in Greek. They have become Roman pagans and then started practicing Christianity. But that should immediately raise some red flags like, oh, it doesn’t sound like they’re doing Samhain over there in Turkey. And they spread all across Southern Poland and India, parts of Eastern Europe. They go across what are called the low country Southern Germany, France, Spain, especially the northwest tip of Spain, Galacia, and then the British Isles as well. Now within a fairly short span of time, other tribes and groups kind of push them out.
And so later on when we talk about the Celts, we typically mean northwest Spain, Northwest France, Ireland, and then Scotland, England, Wales. Still these are large swaths of area speaking several different languages having pretty different cultures. And so it’s a myth and a mistake to treat them as one monolithic group that has a culture, that’s a people that is spread across Europe. That’s just not how tribes worked or work. Malcolm Chapman makes this point really effectively in his book, the CELs, the construction of a myth that KET is not even what these different tribes called themselves. Rather. Cal toy comes from the Greek historian ISTs using it to refer to a group of barbarians north and west of the Greeks. It’s just kind of a catchall for the barbarians over there. It’s not an accurate term to describe any one group of people, and Chapman begins his book actually quoting JR Tolkien, who in addition to writing the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit knew a ton about language.
If you know anything about Tolkien, you know that to be true, and he points out how maddening because there is a language family called Celtic, but it doesn’t refer to just one group of people any more than you would talk about the romance peoples and lump together modern Italians and Spaniards. It’s these are not the same people, French and Portuguese. There’s enough differences that you wouldn’t lump all those together presumably into one is like Latins or romance peoples, but that’s what’s happening here in Tolkien’s words to many, perhaps two most people outside the small company of the great scholars past and present Celtic of any sort is a magic bag into which anything may be put and out of which almost anything may come, anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.
In other words, people are talking nonsense and just imagining stuff pulling out of this magic bag of history, Celtic fill in the blank. So if you want to imagine ancient pagans doing your preferred thing, just call it Celtic. It’s a vague enough term that no one can really say you’re wrong. There’s going to be a few more reasons for that as well. As I mentioned, this is a term not used by any groups of themselves, is the term the Greeks use as a catchall for non-Greek people in a certain part of Europe. Similarly, they use Persian as kind of a catchall for the non-Greek people to the east of them. But as Chapman points out, we would never use the fact that the Greeks call them all Persians as evidence that they had the same ethnicity, language and culture all across the Middle East. They clearly did not and do not.
And yet we treat the entire northwest of Europe as if it’s populated by a single people that we can call the kelps. So the word barbarian, by the way, I’ve used that a few times here. That is the Greek term for non-Greek coming from the way they sound when they talk bar, bar, bar, bar, bar. And you wouldn’t be so foolish as to imagine. The barbarians are like one group of people. Oh, the Barbarian king said the new barbarian feast days is on X day. No, of course not. But you’re using kelt, you’re using a term that’s about that level of inaccurate. Another reason that matters is because among the different Celtic peoples, like the Gauls in France, we know a couple things about their religion and a couple things that limit our knowledge of their religion. So of all people, I want to turn down to Julius Caesar who knew the Gauls pretty well from having fought them.
And he wrote an entire book on the Gaelic wars and he points out that the Druids, even though they would use Greek characters to transliterate their language or languages in public and private transactions when it came to religion, they wouldn’t write anything down. Now, he hypothesizes that they seem to do that for two reasons. Number one, because they don’t want to divulge their teachings to the larger populace. And number two, because they’re afraid that if they get accustomed to writing, then they won’t have as much stuff committed to memory. So everything was transmitted at the level of the Druids, like the religious teachers orally, nothing was written down and it was actually taught not to write things down apparently. Do you see why that makes it very difficult to say? And they definitely had this religion and this is definitely what it looked like. And here are the doctrines and here are the feast days.
In addition to the fact that you’re lumping together people from Spain, France, England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, all into one group. Many of the people within that group are not literate, and many of the ones that are literate as a matter of principle won’t write their religious teachings down. So now jump forward a couple thousand years and try to guess what their religion was. And you can see why scholars have been stymied. So when someone tells you confidently, here’s what happened at sen, and here’s all of the old ancient Celtic rituals, they’re making that up because we don’t have the evidence. The little bits we do have actually point against the claims about sa. So Caesar goes on to say one of the leading tenets of the French Celts that he knew the galls were that the souls do not become extinct but pass after death from one body to another.
Now in other words, they believed in reincarnation. Now if you believe in reincarnation, you’re probably not celebrating SA in the mythological version of it, national Geographic and others have put out of a day of commemorating the dead. Well, according to this view, the dead aren’t even dead. They’ve just gone to live in some other body, so they’re probably not walking around among the dead on one night of the year. No, they’re walking around among the dead all the time because they’re a different person. Now my point there is there isn’t this whole idea of Celtic paganism is a misnomer and is a myth. There’s great work done on this, by the way, ironically, by a historian who is also a pagan Ronald Hutton in his book The Stations of the Sun, a History of the Rural Year in Britain, and he points out that modern scholars no longer believe in this idea of a Celtic religion because it doesn’t make any sense.
He points out in the old days, they would look at this Irish God who was known as Lou LUGH, and then they would notice there are all these Roman cities that we find everywhere from England to Southern France to the Netherlands, to Northern France, to Poland with inscriptions in France and Spain as well that have lu as part of the name or lug as part of the name. And they thought, ah, these must be cities named in honor of this local God. But as Hutton points out, the problem with that theory is in Roman ga we actually find hundreds of religious dedications to different gods, and not one of them refers to this Irish God Lou. And so we now think that Lou probably is not a term for this God, but rather the word meant something else. Maybe the God being worshiped in Ireland isn’t the same one.
Pagans in France or Spain or Poland or wherever are worshiping, which of course makes sense. But as Hutton points out, this point matters because this same generation of scholars who fell for this idea of their pan Celtic deities, that all these different tribes worship the same gods, and even by the same names also tended to fall for the idea of pan Celtic festivals that all of these different Celts celebrated an important religious feast day called Samhain. It turns out that is built on this not just rocky foundation, but a foundation we know to be false. It just papers over all the differences between these different groups and treats them as one group with one culture. Now I’m leaving aside one group of Celts which are the Irish because it needs to be treated a little separately. As Davis points out, we do find Irish evidence of Salin.
The problem is we only find Irish evidence of saun just like we only found Irish evidence of the God lie. So the fact that all of the evidence for Saun comes from Irish material is reinforced by the fact that we find no instances whatsoever of anything Halloween looking before Christianity in early Welsh or Scottish material except in areas of heavy Irish migration. So to the extent you have anything like Saun, it seems to be only in Ireland or places where the Irish are migrating and showing up, but then you say, okay, fine, it’s not a Celtic feast day then Irish feast Day, isn’t that the same thing? Well, no, for two reasons, number one, because the whole idea of the Catholic church changed its liturgical calendar to respond to this Celtic Feast Day presupposes this thing is a big thing across Europe. The idea that the entire church is calendar was going to be changed to respond to one island, no offense, Ireland is obviously less plausible.
But number two, and actually more importantly, even though we find plenty of references to Samhain, none of them give any indication of anything like a religious or supernatural significance. So I want you to think about that because you’ll hear these very detailed accounts about everything that happened at SEN and all these religious feasts and festivals and rights and all this, and none of it is true. None of that is coming. Now look, let’s be clear. The fact we don’t have any evidence of it doesn’t mean people weren’t doing something, but it does mean we don’t know what they were doing. If anything, we have plenty of evidence of what they were doing. None of it mentions religion. But the popular story is that this is a religious holy day by all evidence. It’s not. This is a harvest festival. So this is an agrarian society where you’re working hard in the field and then it’s harvest time and you’re gathering everything up, and then on this day, everybody gets together because the work is over and it’s time to have a feast and celebrate.
It’s like a retirement party, but for the year. I mean in the same way that you might have a party when your kid’s school gets out, but that doesn’t make it like a religious festival. It’s just like, Hey, we’ve got free time. It’s Friday evening, let’s go to the bar. That kind of mentality, that’s what’s going on with that one by all the available evidence. I want to repeat Davis’s claim that we have recognition, but it is almost exclusively to agrarian routines and there is no indication of actions exhibiting a religious or supernatural significance. So we’ve seen so far, number one, there is no Pan Celtic religious festival across Europe called Saan does not exist. It’s a scholarly myth. Number two, there is a local Irish harvest festival, but it doesn’t appear to have any clear religious overtones at all. So the idea that Halloween is a big response by the Christians because they’re worried that what the Irish people are relaxing after the harvest is nonsensical, right? So everything else that we’re going to hear about how the dead walked among the living on Saun, those are just myths that non Celtic, non Pagan people have invented and projected onto the past. It gets to the second claim was Sen, the Celtic New Year, because if you remember from the National Geographic clip, it just casually claimed that it was
CLIP:
That night also marked the Celtic New Year and was considered a time between years.
Joe:
So you can see why it matters that is allegedly New Year’s because it’s its time between years when the dead can walk among the living. And you can find, if you go to the history channel’s website and look up what is the history of Halloween, they claim the same thing. There’s this group called the Kelp, which channel that isn’t true. The Kelps who lived 2000 years ago, mostly in the area that’s now the Ireland, the United Kingdom in Northern France celebrated their new year on November 1st. They just claim this as if this is a clear fact of history and it’s not. It’s simply untrue. As Davis points out, the only pre-Christian Celtic calendar we have makes no mention of sa. It’s from France, not from Ireland, and it clearly has the new year at the winter solstice, not November 1st. So you might say, well, where did this myth that the new year started on November 1st?
Start from, well, it started from Sir John Rise in the 19th century. He’s a philologist, meaning he’s studied languages. He suggested that it had been the Celtic New Year, this is his invention, but he was clear he didn’t get that from any ancient records. He wasn’t able to point to any ancient documents that said that. Instead, he was looking at 19th century Welsh and Irish folklore and then taking from those stories projecting onto the past that therefore November 1st must have originally been the new year. Now we can’t prove that’s wrong, I suppose, but there’s no evidence for it. In fact, there’s a good deal of evidence against it. The problem is as Ronald Hutton points out writing Christianity and the Roman calendar all enter whales in Ireland as part of the same process. So by the time you have literacy, it’s because Christians coming from a Roman background have arrived.
And so the earliest calendars we see here in places like Wales and Ireland, remember excluding the one pre-Christian one that doesn’t mention SA and shows the winter solstice. By the time you have widespread literacy, it’s because there’s widespread Christianization. And unsurprisingly, we find New Year’s on January 1st or on March 25th, which is when it falls on the Roman calendar. So all the evidence we have points against November 1st, but we can’t say anything more definitively because we don’t have anything besides that. If you just said, I think there’s a tribe in the Pacific that doesn’t have any written records and is undiscovered and their New Year’s is May 17th, I can’t prove you wrong because I haven’t found that tribe and neither have you, but you probably shouldn’t claim that as a fact because you’re making it up. So November 1st is not the Celtic New Year. There probably wasn’t a single Celtic New Year, but if there was, it was probably the winter solstice. So so much for claim number two. What about claim number three? Did the dead walk the earth on silent? Now you remember this is because it was allegedly between the years. Here’s how National Geographic puts it,
CLIP:
A magical time when the Ghost of the dead walked the Earth.
It was the time when the veil between death and life was supposed to be at its thinnest.
Joe:
And sure enough, history channel likewise claims that Celts believed the night before the new Year, which again, they’re just imagining. November 1st is the new year, and then there’s also one group called the Celts, and they believe that the night before the New Year, the boundary between the worlds of living and the dead became blurred, and that’s why they celebrated salmon, which we’ve already seen. All the evidence doesn’t say anything about that. It only talks about it being a harvest festival, not the beginning of the new year, but it is the end of the agricultural season. As Robert Davis points out that the festival issen on November 1st figured prominently in the agricultural and legal calendars of early Medieval Ireland is beyond dispute. So in the Middle Ages, sen is still an important time of year because as an agricultural society, the modern equivalent would be the end of the fiscal year.
If you’re familiar with this, if you work in certain businesses, you’ve got the end of a certain cycle, and it might be, May 1st might be a different beginning of a different month. Well, likewise, you’ve got a school year, the academic year stops so you can be out for the summer. These are seasonal. And so it makes sense that in an agricultural society when the agricultural year is over, you celebrate the end of the year, and that’s an important both legal and agricultural day. So important things happened politically then you would if the people needed to come together to vote on something or legal stuff that kind of stuff happened on. So it’s less exciting when you find out the actual stuff going on there. There was plenty of festivity as well. But as Davis points out, with the exception of Dru forgeries such as a notorious 17th century fraudster, Jeffrey Keating, no pre-Christian or medieval historical source, clearly associates sa with any of the three pillars of the Pagan hypothesis.
Now, what are the Pagan hypothesis claims? Number one, that this was the day of the veneration of the dead. We don’t see any evidence of that. Number two, that this is a day of supernatural activity because of the temporal proximity to the other world, that this is that very thin line between the living and the dead on New Year’s Eve, October 31st and number three, we don’t see celebration of it as a Celtic New Year’s Eve in the first place. So none of those things are true as far as we can tell. They’re just popularly repeated myths. And I wanted to contrast here a kind of infamous scene from a movie Halloween two, and it’s infamous because they get both the name and the meaning of saun wrong and then contrast that with an actual Pagan talking about what Saun actually was. So first, here’s Halloween two,
CLIP:
Sam Hane. It means the Lord of the Dead, the end of summer, the Festival of Sam Hane.
Joe:
Now want to contrast that with Jacob Todd, who as I say is a pagan trying to reclaim thon, but even he realizes it’s not Sam Hane and it’s not the Lord of the Dead. The word doesn’t mean that at all as he points out
CLIP:
Its name, literally just means the summer’s end, which alludes us to the date of Samhain, which is October 31st going into November 1st.
Joe:
So that should automatically give you a clue, okay, if this just means summer’s end, it’s not the name of some pagan deity, it’s not the Lord of the dead, it’s just summer’s end like you might find on a school calendar. It has those kind of connotations and it turns out it doesn’t just have those connotations in the name, but also in everything we know about it. So I’m going to go back to Jacob Toson again.
CLIP:
Now, when it comes to the actual traditions of ancient salmon festivals, this is where it gets a little harder. There are a few stories that do mentions still, but typically it’s as a date, not necessarily as a description of the festival.
Joe:
So he’s going to claim there’s some stories that exist that talk about the thinning of the veil, but if you saw in the clip, he puts five stories on the screen that take place at S, none of which mention any particular religious rights. They just use it as a convenient kind of storytelling device. Oh, they met each other at this festival at sa, that sort of thing. It’s the end of summer. People come together in the same way that you might have a movie set at Christmas time, and it doesn’t mean you actually think this is a thinning of the veil when elves come out from the North Pole. No, it’s convenient for storytelling purposes, whatever religious or non-religious reasons it may have. My point there is that the stuff we have about salmon doesn’t make it seem like a major religious feast day. It simply doesn’t.
So what about this stuff with the dead? Because there clearly is with Halloween, this connection with the dead. Well, as Hutton points out, that’s not actually in salmon at all. That’s all from Christianity that the dead, as he puts it, arrived later in 9 98, Olo Abbot of Clooney ordered a solemn mass for the souls of all Christian dead in his Monas and his daughter houses. Now, originally, this is in February, but he sets this precedent of having a day set aside for praying for the souls and purgatory, praying for the dead, and eventually it gets linked up to All Saints Day, but not the day before. It’s the day after all Souls Day. And so that sets this time of year, not just as a time when we joyously celebrate the saints in heaven, but are also reminded of the reality of suffering and purgatory and death.
And so that is not something they’re getting from Irish paganism. That’s something they’re getting from Roman Catholicism. Indeed, as Hutton points out by the high Middle Ages, both festivals, he means here All Saints Day and All Souls Day had become primarily a time at which to pray for dead friends or family members. And it seems appropriate, right? You’ve got the withering of flowers and leaves the coming of frost and it’s natural one’s mind turns to death because all around you things appear to be dying. Now, he acknowledges it remains possible that Northern European pagans honored their debt at this time. But not only is the evidence still utterly wanting, but Fraser, who was one of the major figures in creating this myth, his chain of reasoning completely breaks down. So we can’t prove again that it didn’t happen, but we have no evidence that it did.
So that’s the third claim, that the dead are walking among the living and that’s why people are praying for the dead. Nope, they’re praying for the dead because of Christianity. The fourth claim. Did Samhain bonfires drive the dead away? Well, obviously if the dead weren’t walking among the living because it wasn’t really new and everything else, then it makes sense that the bonfire stuff also probably not going to be real. And sure enough, it made sense that there were bonfires because you’ve got the end of the harvest. And so this makes sense. Time of warfare and trading is it end. So there’s a season, and when you go back to the ancient world, there’s a time of year where you can go out to fight. You don’t want to be fighting in the middle of winter because you’re both going to die. And so everything comes an end, the trade season, the warfare season, the agricultural season, and therefore it makes sense that you have things like the fesh of sa, which local kings gather the people, and it’s a favorite setting for early Irish tales.
We already talked about that. And so he points out how in these tales we find nothing but meetings and games and amusements and entertainments and eating and feasting that from the actual ancient medieval evidence, and we don’t see anything suggesting some ancient religious rituals. And so he says, Hutton says these activities together with a great deal of boasting and brawling are precisely those portrayed at the fish and this and other accounts of it. Then he says, no doubt there were religious observances as well, but none of the tales ever portrays any. So we can’t again prove that there weren’t some religious elements that times, I mean, anytime people come together, they may want to honor God or honor their gods, but this wasn’t a religious feast. I mean, if you come together for dinner, you might say grace before meal, but I don’t think you’d normally call dinner like a religious time of year.
Indeed. And remember we mentioned Jeffrey Keating Hutton, likewise says other than him, he’s going to be one of the ones who mentions this idea of a sacred fire, even Keating, who is considered a forger and thoroughly unreliable. He doesn’t give us any sources for this idea of these old SA bonfires and sacred fires. And he implies a kind of pan Celtic degree of religious and political centralization in Pagan Ireland. And that doesn’t seem to be true at best. I mean, he’s either making it up or Hutton suggests this might be a mistake in transference of the cusp of Beltane at the beginning of the summer, there was a religious holiday that some ancient Irish pagan celebrated. And so some of the claims about Saun seemed to be disclaim about Beltane applied to the wrong day or just applied by analogy. Well, at the beginning of summer was a time when people thought the dead could walk.
Then maybe they thought they could walk among us at the end of the summer. Sure, maybe, but you don’t have any evidence of that. So Hutton goes on to say, we put Keating’s story aside, the rites of SA do not feature in, sorry. He said, we have this considerable suspicion that the reason that the rights of SA do not feature in medieval Irish literature is because by the time it was written centuries after Christianity has arrived, the authors don’t know what they’d been. In other words, by the time you have these 12th century documents, they’re not talking about the religious rights of SA because they have no idea what people did on sa. Now why does that matter? Well, because that’s a pretty clear sign that Halloween isn’t a response to this feast day that people don’t even know what it was or what people did.
I mean, you can see on the calendar there was a day called salan, and you can see that this was a an administrative cultural time of year that was important. And there are plenty of stories set at it, but no one has any idea what religious implications it had or rights it had whatsoever. So that’s going to mean number one, you can’t plausibly say they’re the things we do at Halloween. You’re just making that up. And number two, it makes it really clear that Halloween isn’t a Christian response to Saun because we don’t know what was, even the Christians didn’t even know what was going on at Saun by the time Christianity had really taken over Ireland. Okay, so how do we make sense of the bonfires then if it’s not this pagan thing? I’d point out that before electricity fires are pretty important for just having lights at night, but there’s also a longstanding, not Irish, Celtic, pagan practice of lighting a candle and praying for the dead.
And this happened in churches in the days before All Saints and All Souls Day. But during the Reformation, this becomes outlawed that you are not allowed to pray for the dead. And so the people who continue to hold on to Catholic Christianity go outside. And so as Hutton points out, we actually do have evidence of people in the countryside in Britain going outside in the middle of the night on the night before All Saints Day, which is to say on Halloween, even into the early 19th century. And they were doing this to go out to have a place to pray for the dead when they weren’t allowed to do it in the churches because Catholicism was outlawed. And so they then light a bunch of burning straw on the end of a fork and they’d kneel around in a circle and pray for the souls of relatives and friends until the flames burned out.
In other words, they very much did what you would do in church with a candle, but with a bonfire outside instead. And they used it as an opportunity. So you would have on the hillsides on the night of Halloween, these bonfires that would pop up all over the place, and it was in the middle of the night. It was harder to track down and get the people who were doing it, but it was people quietly practicing their religion and praying for the dead. But all of that is coming again, not from Paganism, but from Christianity. Alright, so that leads us to the biggest claim that All Saints state is itself a response to sa. Now you’re going to find a bunch of different claims. I’m going to start with National Geographic. I’ve been looking at them kind of throughout, but then I’m going to give you another example from evangelical Protestants making the same fictional claim. But here’s Nat Geo. First,
CLIP:
The Catholic Church’s influence grew in Europe. It frowned on the pagan rituals like Samhain. In the seventh century, the Vatican began to merge it with a church sanctioned holiday. So November 1st was designated All Saints Day to honor martyrs and the deceased faithful.
Both of these holidays had to do with the afterlife and about survival after death. It was a calculated move on the part of the church to bring more people into the fold.
Joe:
And here’s a popular evangelical Christian making the same kind of claim.
CLIP:
Now remember in the eight hundreds after Christ, a lot of the pagans became Christians, but their customs still survived and they merged it with Christian holidays. Now listen carefully, the Catholic church celebrated All Saints Day on the 1st of November and All Souls Day on the second, but there was a problem these days we’re too close to Saun, so they didn’t like it because of course, Saun was a festival for Pagans, right? Celebrated other gods, not Jesus Christ, not God. So a lot of people believed what they did is they chose to merge it and call it Halloween.
Joe:
So those are kind of the two major versions of the story. And one version, Halloween is created as a response to Samhain. And the other is just like there’s this awkward like, oh, you’ve got a major day about the dead the night before. We’ve got two feast days, one celebrating the dead in heaven and one praying for the dead in purgatory. What a weird coincidence. None of that is accurate, but you’ll notice those are not even the same version of the story. Likewise, I want to give you a little bit from Lisa Morton’s Trick or Treat a History of Halloween because these are books written on the subject that repeat these same falsehoods, and as we’re going to see easily disproven falsehoods, she comes maybe the closest to at least trying to get it right. She says, SO’S existence is unquestionable. Now that’s true, but what she doesn’t tell you is as a not clearly religious harvest festival, but fine.
Okay? And sometime in the mid eighth century, Pope Gregory II moved the Feast of the Martyrs to November 1st, the date of sa, and indicated that it was henceforth to be a celebration of all the saints. A hundred years later, Pope Gregory Iiv or Universal Observance of the Day then kind of gets the history right, not quite we’re going to see, but then she asks, well, was the date moved to November 1st so that the harvest could be used to feed the hoards of pilgrims flocking to Rome for the Saints celebration as some historians have suggested, or was it relocated in the calendar in the attempt to co-Opt sa, which the Christianized Celts were slow to give up? Well, we already saw the Christianized Kelps. First of all, it’s a misnomer. These are a bunch of different groups of people. Number two, when they’re Christianized, they’re so thoroughly Christianized, they don’t even know what their ancestors did onsen.
And number three, as we’re going to see, that’s neither of the possibilities that Lisa Morton gives are why it ends up on November 1st. It was not a decision originally from Rome. It wasn’t about Roman pilgrims and it wasn’t about sa. Remember, once you stop believing in Pan Celtic religion, SA is a harvest festival on one island. The idea that the entire calendar has to be changed at a universal observance created to co-opt or rebut, that doesn’t make sense on its face. But now I’m going to give you the actual history and you’ll see why this is so laughably wrong. Christians are celebrating All Saints or what would later become known as All Saints by the mid three hundreds originally as a feast to honor all those who’ve been martyred. And it’s mentioned in the three hundreds, and it originally happened on May 13th by the four hundreds.
Different places are celebrated at different times. So for instance, Syrian churches hold this commemoration during Easter week. Greek churches do the Sunday after Pentecost, Rome keeps the older practice of May 13th, and Pope Bonis Iiv actually endorses that one in 6 0 9. It doesn’t move then until a little bit after that. I believe in the eighth century, might be the ninth century, but it is Pope Gregory iii. But notably Gregory II doesn’t invent that. Rather the church’s liturgical calendar up in Germany, they had started celebrating on November 1st. It makes sense. We don’t know exactly why they did that. The best guess is well, it’s fall. People are thinking about death more. So it seems like a fitting time. And so it doesn’t start in Ireland in Germany, and it isn’t done by the Roman Catholic Church originally. The church in Rome responds to a local custom in Ireland, excuse me, in Germany, and then makes the German practice universal.
So meanwhile, in Ireland, it’s not on October 31st. It was instead on April 20th in the early Middle Ages. So that’s a lot of information. The point that you need to know there is the local Irish church wasn’t trying to use All Saints as a response to Saun. There’s no reason to believe they needed to respond to sa. It wasn’t a clear Pagan festival in the first place, and it doesn’t seem to have held much sway on the popular imagination after Christianity arrived. So instead, they’re celebrated on April the 20th, nowhere near sa, the November 1st date doesn’t come from Rome, doesn’t come from Ireland, it comes from Germany. And so as Hutton points out, both Celtic Europe and Rome are following a Germanic idea. So unless you want to say the Germans started celebrating All Saints Day on November 1st because they’re worried about a local holiday in Ireland that had been celebrated hundreds of years earlier.
You see how that doesn’t make any sense at all. Rome isn’t doing this because they’re worried about tourists in Rome. They’re doing this to have a common date where everybody around christened and everyone around the church can celebrate All Saints Day on the same day, and so they choose the day that was being done in Germany. That’s it. There’s no big mystery, and it’s a nice time of year to celebrate and to remember the dead. Okay, so what can we take from all this? What’s kind of the big picture of Pagan Halloween? I like the way Hutton puts it. It must be concluded that the medieval records furnish no evidence that November 1st was a major Pan Celtic festival and there’s no evidence of religious ceremonies even where Saun was observed. There it is in a nutshell. This wasn’t a Pan Celtic thing and it wasn’t a clearly religious thing.
Maybe there were religious festivals, we don’t know, but it wasn’t something that seemed to be bigger than Ireland in the first place. So it’s an end of summer gathering with no clear religious overtones. It has nothing to do with the creation or the timing of Halloween. Halloween instead comes from the celebration of All Saints Day, and it’s the evening before that All Saints Day itself comes from the early church’s desire to honor the saints, and particularly the early Christian martyrs. All Souls Day, as we heard, gets added in the Middle Ages as a way to remind us to pray for the dead and to remember the fact that we will one day die. Okay, so let’s get this practical for a minute as we wrap this up. How should Christians approach Halloween then? Well, obviously the popular answer, oh, don’t do it because it’s pagan or reclaim.
Its pagan roots or any of that is just built on pure fiction. So where does that leave us? I would say on the one hand, you don’t want to become overly obsessed with the dark demonic macabre. In Philippians chapter four, St. Paul says, finely brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there’s any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. That’s very good. Nevertheless, we don’t want to be blind to the reality of the demonic or evil or death. And so we’re reminded, for instance, in one Peter five to be sober and watchful because they’re adversary. The devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. And we should also be mindful of our own death. Now, I realize this next verse isn’t in Protestant Bibles, but there’s a great verse in Sir Acts chapter seven verse 36, and all you do remember the end of your life and then you will never sin the point there being, you should be mindful of the fact that you’ll one day die and that will help you to live accordingly.
So it’s actually healthy to be periodically reminded of the spooky reality that you’re going to be a skeleton. One day you’re going to die and your body will rotten the grave and hopefully it is united to Christ such that it will rise again Gloriously from the dead. Thomas Keas and Imitation of Christ, the I believe bestselling book in the Middle ages had a beautiful reflection on it. He said, if you’ve ever seen a man die, remember that you too must go the same way in the morning. Consider that you may not live till evening and when evening comes, do not dare to promise yourself the dawn, be always ready, therefore, and so live that death will never take you unprepared. You should have that like be joyful. By all means, don’t be just gloomy about death, but don’t be oblivious to it either. After all, many dies suddenly and unexpectedly for in the unexpected hour.
The Son of God will come. When that last moment arrives, you’ll begin to have a quite different opinion of the life that is now entirely past, and you’ll regret very much that you were so careless and remiss, right? So you should live in such a way that you are prepared for your death, which means it is good to be reminded of that. And so medieval art has this really fascinating bent of things like the dance macabre, where it’s the dance of death. And so you can find things, everything from just skeletons and decomposing bodies dancing around to a procession where it has kings and popes and priests and ordinary people, and you name it, being marched into the grave by smiling skeletons. And the point there is to remind you that high or low, you will die and you’ll stand before God. And that’s a good thing to be reminded of.
There’s a reason Jesus gives us parables reminding us of the last judgment. So I think embraced in the right way, Halloween can be spiritually enriching precisely by reminding us in not too heavy of a way that evil exists, that death exists, and that we should live accordingly. If I can close on a personal note at my own wedding, my wife designed the idea for the bridal cake. Our friend Kate is an amazing cake decorator, and so it has the sacred heart of Jesus. It has the immaculate heart of Marion has the crest of John Paul ii, but I had free reign to design the groom’s cake, and so I just put Memento Maori with the skull on it. Memento mori just means remember your death. And so it is appropriate to have festivity. This is good and healthy, and Christians should not be afraid that a party is going to somehow displease God unless you’re doing something wicked, getting drunk or having premarital sex or whatever.
If you’re not doing something sinful, then the mere fact that you’re together at a party is good. Jesus went to parties. The wedding Feast of Cana is at a party Jesus is not afraid of. I mean, this is one of the arguments against him, right? That, oh, the son of man comes and they call them gluttons and drunkards because Jesus and his disciples are going to parties and eating and drinking, and people were afraid they were having too much fun. Don’t be like that. Have fun. Embrace Halloween in the good sense, as long as you don’t embrace evil free real sake, being reminded of evil even while you’re having fun, it’s actually a really healthy Christian attitude. So I would say don’t be afraid to be a little bit spooky. As long as you’re not glamorizing evil. Don’t be afraid to have. We’ve got a black cat inflatable that the kids like in front of our house. It’s not glamorizing evil, it’s not celebrating wickedness or the occult, and it certainly is not a represenation of some imaginary Irish harvest Festival called s. So please Christians, I’m begging you stop repeating these weird falsehoods about paganism and stop being afraid of things that you have every right to enjoy as a Christian. Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.